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| Reform is about political power and fairness, does not affect funding Rebutting misinformation, I explain in a letter to the editor that revising the Census and drawing fair districts would not affect a prison town's funding. Read more | Census engaged in 'prison-based gerrymandering,' report says Did you know that your vote counts more if you live near a prison? That's what the census says. Andrew Paley reports on our Illinois research in Medill.... Read more | Somerset County says no to prison-based gerrymandering A vote in Somerset County Maryland means that ending prison-based gerrymandering is getting closer. An NAACP- and ACLU-led group of county leaders and.... Read more |
Prison-based gerrymandering dilutes your vote
“There are many ways to hijack political power. One of them is to draw state or city legislative districts around large prisons — and pretend that the inmates are legitimate constituents.”—Brent Staples
Called prison-based gerrymandering, the practice finds its clearest example in Anamosa, Iowa where a large prison constituents almost an entire city council district. Council districts are supposed to contain the same number of people, but basing districts on non-voting non-resident prison populations gives a handful of residents the same political power as thousands of residents elsewhere in the city.
Learn more about Anamosa:
Census Bureau's Counting of Prisoners Benefits Some Rural Voting Districts by Sam Roberts, New York Times, October 24, 2008
The Census Bureau should not be enabling prison-based gerrymandering
This website documents the work of the Prison Policy Initiative. We examine a once-obscure Census Bureau glitch that undermines our democracy and suggest workable federal, state and local solutions that would reduce the harm caused by the Census Bureau's prison miscount.
Animation by Adell Donaghue Design
The Census Bureau counts people in prison as if they were residents of the communities where they are incarcerated, even though they remain legal residents of the places they lived prior to incarceration. As Census data is used to apportion political power at all levels of government, crediting thousands of disproportionately urban and minority men to other communities has staggering implications for modern American democracy.
In New York State, for example, one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the 1990s actually “moved” into a newly constructed prison. The State bars people in prison from voting, but their presence in the Census boosts the population of the upstate districts whose legislators favor prison expansion. Without this phantom population, 7 upstate New York State Senate districts would not meet minimum population requirements and would have to be redrawn.
Our 2002 report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York was the first district-by-district analysis of the impact of the prison miscount on state legislative redistricting and the first to suggest workable policy solutions.
In the years since, we’ve extended our New York research to examine how inaccurate Census data has caused democratic distortion in more than 11 states and 200 counties.
Stay informed
Sign up for our weekly newsletter about the ongoing movement to change the U.S. Census' method of counting people in prison.
Speaking engagements
- February 16, 2010: We'll be doing a briefing about prison-based gerrymandering in New York by conference call at 1pm EST. Join us. More info.
- March 25-28, 2010: Peter Wagner will be attending the National Redistricting Seminar in Austin, Texas organized by the National Conference of State Legislatures
Not near you? Invite Peter to your town.
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